In a recent interview with Finextra’s Debi Bell-Hosking, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov reflected on 2025’s biggest digital asset milestones and how they could shape the new year.
He declared the GENIUS Act, which established the first federal guardrails for US dollar-pegged stablecoins, as 2025’s biggest success. Having spent the past year speaking with legislators in Washington, Nazarov was at the White House to witness the landmark bill signed into law.
He explained how accelerating institutional stablecoin adoption expands the purchasing power for tokenized real-world assets such as equities, commodities, and funds, which will bring trillions of dollars in capital onchain.
Nazarov is now focused on driving the bipartisan effort to pass a historic crypto market structure bill, which will have an even greater impact on advancing digital assets.
In 2026, he said legislators will have to walk a fine line to ensure decentralized finance (DeFi) innovation can flourish in the U.S.
“My hope is that the decentralized finance community is regulated more permissively, like the internet in its early days was regulated very permissively, which had a very big benefit for the U.S. economy because the internet wasn’t something that was difficult to build things inside of.”
In the future, he expects DeFi will constitute up to a third of global finance.
“They cannot make it so onerous for decentralized finance to operate in the U.S. or in relation to digital assets that everyone chooses not to operate in the U.S.,” he explained.
“This is not something you can make a mistake with as a legislator and still experience economic success in your economy.”
Nazarov’s 2026 prediction is that digital assets will continue to gain recognition as a superior asset class that promotes global liquidity and connectivity with less friction, cost, and complexity.
Ultimately, he explained, “You really can’t compete with global liquidity.”
Watch the full interview.